Knowledge-Based Economy: Frameworks & Measurement Techniques

This study commences by investigating the existing Knowledge Based Economic frameworks (KBE frameworks) developed by the World Bank, OECD, APEC and ABS. This research found that existing KBE frameworks have proposed 128 or more knowledge indicators or variables for 150 countries. It also highlighted certain pillars of the knowledge economy where they divide the variables under each of those pillars and rank countries according to the observations on each variable. However, some anomalies or shortcomings in existing frameworks have been observed whereby it was quite difficult to judge the universal applicability of those frameworks to measure a country’s knowledge economy performance. That is the motivation to build a generalisable measurement framework to investigate efficiency, productivity and the long term sustainability of KBE policies in selected South East Asian countries (mostly Association of South East Asian in short ASEAN) and emerging knowledge economics. This is done in order to widen the knowledge-based economy concept beyond the current frameworks and to investigate the pros and cons of the existing frameworks in detail.